First, I would like to say that, as a male editor of Wikipedia, seeing the
discourse of this week, I was upset and I was inspired to look inward,
questioning my position here on gendergap. I will refrain from taking a
dominant position (if I ever did), and I have something legitimate to say
about a comment made on a recent digest. I have recently been posting every
day, but I assure you I will be much to busy to post on many days. I am
trying to make a gender-based survey with my peers, but I won't reveal
anything more until I am further into it, I just started it today.
Collective Action said something very thought provoking today:
"I imagine if Girl Develop IT set up a group to debate the issues rather
than just getting on with finding women to help women then they'd likely
still be debating the issue (as is this list) rather than actually
addressing the gendergap in IT. If women feel uncomfortable with a
women-only list I don't see this being as much of a problem as women having
a problem with male dominated lists since almost every programming list on
this planet (other than ones set up by and for women-only) are male
dominated. There are no shortage of lists for women to join who feel
uncomfortable with women-only environments. Providing environments for women
who feel uncomfortable in male-dominated environments is what is needed
since the other is already provided by default on the internet. There does
not need to be a debate about the rights and wrongs of this -just the option
of both being available so that everyone has the choice to join a supportive
environment with the gender balance of their
choosing."
Before this, I was mostly opposed to forking. But if this were separated
into a female, male, and co-ed group, and perhaps each person could be a
member if one or two appropriate ones, then we would not have such a
problem. And people part of both lists could correspond with ideas.
Then,this would not be so separate, and maybe not so much opposition and
trolling. Does anyone agree? I think that Collective Action's idea is good,
thoug I don't think that they had the exact same idea that I did.